The Ragged Edge of Night(19)

Yet You said, in your boundless love and wisdom, Weeping may endure for a night—joy comes with the morning.

I cannot help but know it. Against all sense, I believe. Somewhere, beyond the ragged edge of night, light bleeds into this world.





PART 2

LET LOVE CARRY ALL YOUR WORDS

OCTOBER–DECEMBER 1942





7

October second. A crisp orange bite to the air. Across the field, where spent stems of oat or wheat lie down over furrows of stubble, there is a drift of woodsmoke, barely visible. Summer’s birds have moved on, the better part of them, flown to friendlier places. Anton walks to the church with his new family—today they will be. The boys skip beside him, kicking pebbles into the street. Elisabeth holds herself somewhat apart and keeps Maria’s hand in her own. She is stiff-backed, eyes clear and determined, mouth as hard-set as ever. She looks as if she’s marching into Riga. She is wearing the blue dress, the one he first saw her in, and she looks like a flagging Madonna—face fallen into acceptance, and behind her resolute stare, a well of love for her children as inexhaustible as her body and spirit are not. She looks weary, beyond even God’s capacity to measure.

That morning, in the small room over Herr Franke’s shop, Anton stood in a beam of pale sunlight, staring at his thin face in the dim, narrow mirror. Then, he had thought it best to wear his Wehrmacht uniform to the wedding—but now, he can’t say why. The uniform, drab and thick with a forced, upright grimness, is the most formal set of clothing he owns. That must be why he chose it over the suit folded in lavender, the one Anita tied with her blue ribbon. But the uniform makes him distinctly uncomfortable, and not only because the jacket and shirt have grown too tight around the waist. Somehow, in this time of ration stamps and deprivation, he has managed to cultivate the beginnings of a paunch. Too much time spent sitting and thinking; too much time spent slowed and hobbled by bleak memory. This uniform is nothing but a reminder of times better forgotten. Was that, perhaps, the point? Was remembrance his purpose—only now realized—when he pulled the old uniform from one of his trunks and brushed specks of dust from the bronze-green wool? This is his hair shirt, his girdle of thorns, like those some monks wore in ages past—an admonition never to get too comfortable, never to forget how the savior suffered. Monks wore hair shirts, but never friars, until the second of October.

When they first met that morning in the lane outside the farm, the boys seemed reluctant. Al was quiet, unusually still, even for that thoughtful child. More than once, from the corner of his eye, Anton saw the boy open his mouth and close it again, blushing, as if wanting to speak but knowing a child has no right. Paul followed Albert’s lead, as is the way of younger brothers. But when the boys looked up and saw that Anton was wearing his uniform, their eyes brightened. They wanted stories—soldier’s stories. He obliges them with the only one he’s got.

“After I left the order”—after it was taken from me—“they scooped me up and put me in the Wehrmacht.”

“Why?” says Paul.

Hoping to kill me off, no doubt. I’d given them no sound reason to run me through or shoot me when they came to close St. Josefsheim. What else should they have done with the Catholic menace but send us to the Prussian front? To the boy, he says only, “Someone must fill all those army boots.

“Russia had been in Latvia for a long time by then, and the Latvian people were very unhappy and afraid. So we, Germany, said to them, ‘We’ll come over and help you.’

“But it would have been a very long walk, indeed, from Germany to Latvia. Instead, they loaded us all onto airplanes—huge ones, as long as two train cars, maybe bigger. We flew over Prussia in the dark of night.”

“Like the bombers,” Al says.

“A bit like the bombers, yes. But instead of dropping bombs, we dropped soldiers. When they opened the plane’s door, the wind was so cold and fast, it stole the breath right out of my lungs. That wind roared louder than the engines. But the commander, he stood beside the door as if he didn’t notice that terrible noise, and he counted—eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf—and every five seconds, one of us jumped.”

In truth, Anton doesn’t know whether he jumped that night or was pushed, whether some flat, hard hand came out of the roaring darkness and tipped him off his feet into the howl and bite of the plummeting sky. Jumping or falling, the end result was the same. The brute force of gravity, the fury of the wind, the scream of the plane’s engines, somewhere not far above as he rolled through the air. Stars and an inevitable black density—the ground—spun around him. Now and then he could make out, in slow motion, with a kind of momentous and final clarity, the limbs and bodies of other men, paper cutouts against a barely lit sky. And then, like a miracle, the few minutes of his training came back to him. His mind and spirit decided, We will survive this. He felt the downward pull, the frightened, desperate force in the center of his gut, and he oriented around that fear. His limbs spread like the limbs of a falling cat; for a moment, he must have been almost graceful, and the view of the land far below—what little he could see by night—was something close to beautiful, dark and austere. He found that, all along, he had been counting—his mind had sequestered itself in a sheltered corner, far from his panic, and he measured out the seconds with scrupulous care. When the time was right, not a moment before, he pulled the rip cord, and the chute opened above him, spreading and flapping like the wings of an angel.